... Although it's dirty and usually full of other strange human beings unnatural close to one another, the London Underground is one of my favourite places to be.
It's not just that we are travelling through a magical maze of underground tunnels that tickles my fancy, but there is also something quite homely about a tube train and I often like to think of it as some kind of public sitting room.
It is also the place where I usually feel most rebellious.
I don't know if it's because there is such a strict social code of conduct (don't look at anyone and don't smile or show any kind of emotion) or if it's to do with a kind of paradoxical sense of feeling at home and feeling anonymous at the same time, but I often find myself wanting to do things on underground trains like bop my head or dance to the music I'm listening to, or write subversive messages in free newspapers then leave them on the train for someone else to pick up, or smile and wave to people on the platform as we pull away on the train.
Recently however, my most rebellious behaviour has been sitting on the train without any distractions.
Usually, when I take the underground my immediate response is to either take out my phone and play a game, read a book or compulsively reading the adverts above the seats. (I'm not interested in downloading the latest bollocks we're all meant to be believing in so I decline to pick up the free newspapers unless I want to write said subversive messages.) However, I've made an interesting observation that's made me stop doing this.
A friend of mine posted a meme on Facebook recently about how the brain seems to decide that bedtime is the best time to dissect the meaning of life, write essays or come up with political solutions to the worlds problems. I liked this post and added that I too suffered from this problem as well. It then occurred to me that if people are making memes about this issue then must be a common problem and I wondered whether this was an age old problem or a new one. Then I remembered that lots of friends seemed to be suffering from insomnia at the moment and were reporting about this relentless thinking at night.
The idea suddenly popped into my head that perhaps the brain needs to process information and it is only getting a chance to do this at night - when we;ve stopped distracting ourselves.
We are now in a position where we can constantly be distracted and entertained. Out little computers mean that any spare moment that the brain could have to digest information and, more importantly - problem solve, is now being used up either to gain more information or being distracted with games or 'socialising'.
Our brain just doesn't get a chance to really have a good think. 'I think all the time' I hear you say, but I would argue that there is a profound difference in the endless chatter of the mind to really contemplating and problem solving.
For example, one evening my brain, at about 11pm when I had a 6am start, decided
that this was a great time to start to wonder about the differences
between intelligence, wisdom and knowledge. It was an interesting
question but not something I wanted to think about right there and then so I promised my
brain that we would think about it tomorrow on the train. This seemed
to keep it happy and I fell asleep.
The next day as I sat down on the tube, instead of pulling out my book, I began to think. What is intelligence? What is the difference between intelligence and wisdom? What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom and information? As I deconstructed all these words and concepts my brain got its daily fix of digesting and both of us felt full and satisfied. That night I managed to fall asleep almost instantly.
Whether there is a group of evil people rubbing their hands together in glee, or it's just a result of a primitive species dealing with new and shiny technological advances, unless you're involved in an academic pursuit, we spend a lot of time collecting information but don't seem to spend much time any more really thinking...
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